Les dessins bolonais du XVIIe siècle — Le Louvre — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: June 20 → September 9, 2013

To mark the publication of the catalogue of its Bolognese drawings, the Musée du Louvre is presenting a selection of works by artists active in Bologna and the Emilia region during the Seicento.

A follow-up to the Louvre’s 2004 catalogue of its drawings by Ludovico, Agostino and Annibale Carracci, this second volume brings together the works of such contemporaries of the Carracci as Bartolomeo Cesi and Alessandro Tiarini. It covers artists born before 1660 and concludes with the drawings of Burrini.

In all forty-eight artists are represented, some of whom—Lanfranco, Algardi, and Grimaldi, for instance—spent most of their careers away from Bologna, but were so marked by the teaching and the example of the Carracci that their graphic work is authentically Bolognese. The quality and quantity of the Louvre’s Bolognese collection is conclusive proof of the French partiality, in the seventeenth century, for the work of the Carracci—most notably Annibale—whose influence on Classicism in France was primordial.

In the wake of Everhard Jabach, Pierre Crozat and Pierre-Jean Mariette devoted themselves to acquiring the handsomest examples of the Bolognese school’s output. Unfortunately their collections were broken up at the respective sales in 1741 and 1775, although they have been partially regrouped at the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm (Crozat) and the Albertina in Vienna (Mariette). However, the acquisitions made for the Cabinet du Roi, the fortuities of the French collection mania of the last third of the eighteenth century, and the confiscations at the time of the French Revolution, have meant that a substantial part of these treasures has remained in France.